From 1T to 10 params: at what point does an AI model stop being conscious?
shawmakesmagic · x · 2026-10-11
shawmakesmagic poses a thought experiment: if you grant that a 1T-parameter model is conscious, shrink it step by step — at 10B it still holds conversations; at 1B it's error-prone; at 100M barely conversational; at 1M it repeats and hallucinates; at 100k it can't form sentences; at 10 params it's noise.
At what point along this curve does consciousness switch off? If you can't name the line, are you prepared to claim all matrix math is conscious? The argument is a challenge to intuition that scale produces consciousness, and to how we define the criterion in the first place.
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